Small Stream Cuisine

                     Small Stream Cuisine

We have been cooking for a few years now because we thought it would be pretty cool if every Friday we had two or three people go into our staff room and make some delicious tasting food. It has developed over the years and now we have got a cool person in the staff room helping us do our cooking called Andrew.

A few weeks ago we started a activity called 'Small Stream Cuisine'. We had some people cooking for us so that we could enjoy some lovely nice food. We used fruit and veges from our garden to bake something delicious.

  We had some people from our classroom set the tables with some table cloths we collected from our community. We also made our own place mats to go on the table and look wonderful. Some flowers were placed in glass vases and a table completely set with knives, forks, cups and plates. When everything is set up it looks stunning.

Eating in Small Stream Cuisine

tree house

                           Tree House

                            

A few weeks ago some of us started making tree houses out of the pieces of wood from the old pool fence. We also used pieces of wood that Mr George brought to school for us to use for the tree house. 

First we built a ladder to help us get into the tree house. Then we started building the tree house using big branches and putting them in the tree and nailing pieces of wood that we had sawed. Now we have a bridge made of the old pieces of wood from the pool fence. 

Raised Garden Beds

Raised Garden Beds

A few weeks ago we had a Working Bee and made a raised garden bed. We made them out of the old fence which we had replaced. Nathan and Wayne built one for us in the working bee. A few weeks later Nathan, Sheryl and a few other kids from our school helped out and made another raised garden bed. 

We made the raised garden beds because we always had to weed. We made them raised because with a raised garden bed you don't have to weed so much so there were less weeds to pull out. 

This will help heaps because then we can stop having to weed heaps and get other Waitoriki Whenua activities done.

   

History project

History Project

For the last couple of weeks we have been researching about Waitoriki School. We have found a lot of interesting things. It's really cool to learn how the children who used to come here worked. We got into groups and made presentations on Google slides and printed them out we then had them stapled on the wall in the library. 

The display are really pretty. Some students have painted a stream because Waitoriki in English means small stream.

The principal contacted our old principal and asked when we got our Bronze Award for Enviro Schools. We got a lot of information from her so now we know a lot more about our school history.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                    

Bees wax wraps

Bee's Wax Wraps

This year on Lamb and Calf Day we needed to make some money for our Enviro Schools so we were thinking of what we could do to raise money.  Mrs Wilkinson thought that we could make some bee's wax wraps. There were a few people at school who had some bee's wax so we were lucky to get them so we didn't have to buy any. Ms Ryder kindly gave us some fabric so we didn't have to buy anything. 

We will be selling them for $5 on October 25. We  are hoping to get some profit off so we can put in our Enviro School account. 

Plastic Free July

Plastic Free July

For Plastic Free July we thought about ways we could stop using plastic at school. We decided to look at our lunches and for maths we took out our lunchboxes, tallied up how we packaged our food and made some graphs to show how much plastic we currently used. 

We realized we used a lot more plastic than we thought so we decided to use small containers instead of glad wrap and with the shop brought items we took them out of their packets.
 On  July 1 we took our lunch boxes out of our bags and looked at our packaging. Once we had seen our lunch boxes on the ground we worked out that there were still a few people using plastic in their lunch boxes but otherwise the majority of lunch boxes were really good.

We carried on tallying them up.
A few days later after we had completed our bar graphs and saw a huge difference in the columns because there was no plastic wrappers in our lunchboxes. It was really cool to see the changes that we had made.
We have since had a discussion about how we can make our own packaging like bees wax wraps.

2016

Spotswood Primary Enviroday

                 2016 - What an amazing introduction to Enviroschools in North Taranaki!

It has been a privilege working with so many passionate students, teachers, principals, whānau and community groups this year. Your hard work and dedication to this important kaupapa is inspiring -thank you!!!

Kia tau ngā manaakitanga ki runga i koutou katoa. Have a great holiday and a Merry Christmas.

Rachael Ruakere
Enviroschools North Taranaki Facilitator.

Check out this video of Waitoriki School! You guys are amazing!

Our cardboard garden!

Cardboard Garden


In our vegetable garden we had a huge problem! We were sick of pulling out weeds every time we had an Enviro Schools session. 
So this year we have decided to put cardboard down on top our garden as a natural weed mat. 
This was a good idea because cardboard can disintegrate and unlike plastic it will not affect the environment. 
We have cut holes in the cardboard where we have planted our plants and put stepping stones down to stand on and to prevent the cardboard from blowing away.  
We change our cardboard regularly throughout the term and so far we have had no problems with weeds yet!

our new and improved garden

Plastic bottles for Waitoriki - Check out their writeup in the Taranaki Daily News

http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/84029294/rural-school-asks-for-plastic-fizzy-bottles-to-build-greenhouse

Our garden and orchard

We created the garden with the help of volunteers of our community who were Mr Allerby Mrs  Allerby Mrs McQueen and Mr and Mrs George. the teachers Mrs Claridge and Mrs Moratti helped too. the students of waitoriki school all participated in the making of the garden as well.

We used various materials such as wood chicken wire and nails for the fence to keep the rabbits out. we used bamboo as tripods for our beans to climb up. we also planted lots of different types of beans even heritage beans!

the whole idea of making the garden was to keep us busy with our enviro stuff and to have a big school lunch with food from our garden.

Autumn

We like autumn because all the leaves turn different colours, you can play with them and throw them attach other.

Now we have to clean them all up and put them in the compost bins. We do this to feed our worms and make compost for our vegetable gardens

Written by the Junior Green Team.

Welcome to Waitoriki School!

A huge welcome to Waitoriki School. They are out the back of Inglewood, and have 19 students at the school. There is Mr Steenson who is the principal and teacher, Mrs Downer who is our lovely teacher aide, and Mrs Wilkinson who is our sometimes Friday and Thursday teacher. There is also Mrs George who works in the office. Welcome! Can't wait to see what you guys are up to.